Author Archives: Leife Shallcross

And our A Hand of Knaves submissions window is open! Check out our guidelines (for the love of all that’s holy, please read the guidelines) on our submissions page, then submit your word sorcery to knaves.anthology.csfg[at]gmail.com.

And check out our fabulous art from Shauna O’Meara. If you love it like we do, keep an eye out for our crowdfunding campaign for ways and means of scoring awesome Hand of Knaves swag featuring these images.

The A Hand of Knaves (AHOK) editorial team (Leife Shallcross, Chris Large, Simon Petrie and Juliette Morley) has been hard at work behind the scenes organising a solid base from which to build our exciting new anthology. The premise of stories featuring rogues, scoundrels and ne’er-do-wells in speculative fiction seems to have struck a chord with writers and we’re looking forward to reading some fantastic stories when submission open next month.

The CSFG committee may have some announcements to make about some exciting AHOK-related developments in coming weeks, but for now we just want to remind everyone thinking of answering the call, that submissions will be open from the 1st of August to the 15th of November 2017.

That’s a pretty wide window, so there is absolutely no excuse for missing out. But don’t leave your submission to the last minute. Remember, Simon (our slushwrangling knave) will allow up to three of your stories to pass. That’s three bites at the cherry. So even if at first you don’t succeed, you can literally try, try again. Perhaps that makes us gluttons for punishment, but we don’t see it that way.

We want to read your stories of mayhem and misadventure. So get scheming, plotting, and scribing. Send us your brightest treasures, but polish them until we’re dazzled by their brilliance.

A Hand of Knaves will be a character-based anthology, so give us characters we can’t ignore, and will never forget. And writers of a darker bent don’t despair, while we’re definitely after tales of thigh-slapping adventure, we are entirely open to stories of heartache, woe and spine-tingling terror. If you still need inspiration, Leife and Chris (our editorial knaves) have opened up their (until now super-secret) Pinterest board – containing over 200 pins – to get those creative juices flowing.

For those who weren’t able to make it to our June meeting, we road-tested our new venue – the Metis room upstairs at the Canberra City Hellenic Club. This proved to be a bit of a winner, with members taking advantage of the opportunity to grab a coffee or a drink, or even dinner, before the meeting. The Chess Club next door proved to be very rowdy and based on the uproarious cheering, we can only imagine there were some very devious queen-takes-rook moves and dramatic checkmates going on. (Or maybe that was the crowd watching the State of Origin downstairs…)

Our scheduled session with Ian McHugh was unfortunately not able to go ahead (there is a happy ending to this, though), so we enacted our cunning Plan B. This was a round table discussion on was “What advice would you give your younger writer self?”, which generated some thought-provoking conversation. A sample of the advice offered included (paraphrased and possibly embellished by Leife):

Angus: make your villain someone you admire, make them the hero of their own story.

Rik: get that first draft done; polish the sucker later.

Dave O: Find your writing community. You will blossom like a flower in spring.

And that happy ending you were hoping for? Well, if you missed the June meeting, or if you were there, but disappointed you didn’t get to hear what Ian McHugh has to say about getting your short stories published, we’ve rescheduled him for our July meeting:

We are very excited to announce that CSFG will be publishing a new anthology of Australian speculative fiction in 2018!

A Hand of Knaves

Edited by Chris Large and Leife Shallcross

Rogues, thieves, pirates and ne’er-do-wells abound in speculative fiction. Sometimes heroic, sometimes villainous, often somewhere in between, rogues are as likely to steal one’s heart as one’s purse, and show little remorse while helping themselves to either.

So why do we love them? Because they’re imperfect, fallible, and even vulnerable under that carefully-maintained, world-weary exterior.

Rogues represent something we rarely see in our daily lives: ordinary people prepared to take on the “powers that be” by way of guile and subterfuge. But are they only in it for the loot, or are they – deep down – romantic at heart?

We want swashbuckling adventures brimming with humour, loot, and bad blood. Gut-wrenching dilemmas, resolved (for good or ill), by the thrust of a knife in the dark. Thoughtful stories exploring the foggy spaces between justice, and the law. Heroic deeds performed by someone with a less-than-heroic past. Magic and/or technology, combined with charm and charisma, to pull off an impossible heist. Hilarious sea shanties. Sweaty tales of betrayal and Machiavellian intrigue. We want to discover passion, righteous indignation, and the depths of one thief’s hatred of another. How far will the lure of gold, revenge, or the promise of a midnight tryst push one toward the brink of what is honourable, and that which lies beyond? What horrors await a scoundrel who goes too far?

Has this got your imagination going? Good.

Our submissions window will open in August. The full details are available on our publications page.